An Enhanced Pedestrian Dead Reckoning Aided With DTMB Signals

Abstract

Pedestrian Dead Reckoning (PDR) is a good alternative positioning method in Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS)-challenged environments. It has the advantage in terms of infrastructure-independent, while the disadvantage is that, the estimated errors grow rapidly with time. The Digital Terrestrial Multimedia Broadcasting (DTMB) signals have strong transmission power, which contributes to better urban propagation and building penetration than GNSS signals. So, in this paper, an enhanced PDR algorithm aided with DTMB signals is proposed. In the study, a complete software-defined radio receiver is developed to estimate the Doppler speed and range information from DTMB signals. To reduce the accumulated errors of the PDR, the Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) algorithm is carried out to fuse the information of Doppler speed and ranging from the DTMB signals, as well as the information of walking speed and heading from the PDR. The results of the field tests showed that the 95% positioning error of the proposed algorithm is less than 3.94 m, while the PDR only is less than 9.19 m, which suggests the effectiveness of the proposed method to provide continuous positioning by fusing DTMB signals with PDR.